Exemplary

How to spell exemplary

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce exemplary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exemplary mean?

1. adjectiveServing as a desirable model; outstandingly good and worthy of imitation.

Exemplary in a sentence

• Her exemplary attendance record earned a mention at the staff meeting.

• The auditors praised the firm for its exemplary record-keeping.

Where does exemplary come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin exemplaris, meaning 'serving as a model or pattern', which was built on exemplum, 'a sample, model, or example'. That noun in turn derived from eximere, 'to take out' or 'to remove', formed from ex 'out' and emere 'to take or buy', the idea being that a sample is something taken out from the whole to stand for it. English adopted exemplary in the late 1500s, originally describing something held up as a warning or a deserving punishment, before it settled into its modern sense of outstandingly good and worthy of imitation. The same exemplum root sits inside the everyday word 'example', which is a useful memory hook: if you can spell 'example', you are most of the way to spelling exemplary, just swap the ending. The tricky part is the unstressed middle and the -ary tail, since the schwa sounds invite writers to lose track of the vowels.

How the word is built

• exempl- (from exemplum: model, example)
• -ary (adjective suffix: relating to)